What’s Your Hourly Rate?

In today’s professional environment, it seems that a buzzword that you just can’t avoid is “productivity.” Look no further than titles like The 4 Hour Work Week or Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done to get a feel for the zeitgeist of work literature.

I think one of the reasons that this topic is becoming so relevant is that how people perceive the concept of productivity is undergoing a radical shift. In the 1950s, for example, productivity referred to the total amount of work that someone could accomplish. A worker described as productive accomplished a lot.

In fact, the dictionary definition of productivity is:

“the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services”

But over the past 70 years, productivity has come to mean something completely different. If you were to call someone productive today, it would generally refer to his/her ability to spend their time wisely or generate disproportionate results given the effort applied.

In fact, the Wikipedia entry for productivity starts:

“Productivity is an average measure of the efficiency of production. It can be expressed as the ratio of output to inputs used in the production process, i.e. output per unit of input.”

(We’re not here simply to play linguistic tricks, but the dictionary vs. Wikipedia thing is pretty cool.)

And no matter your thoughts about the franchise sales industry regarding the 1950s connotations of the word, it’s almost certain that you wish that selling franchises was a more efficient process.

This is true to the extent that I have never heard a single person ever say that they sell franchises efficiently. Everyone wishes it was easier.

One of our favorite way of thinking about productivity has to do with the way that we spend our time. What do we actually do during the course of the day. And if you were ever to overhear a conversation between my co-worker, Kayvon, and me, you may hear something like, “How do we do more $1,000 per hour work?”

And when we say that, we’re certainly not talking about billing our time out at that rate. (Although I don’t think we’d be against it!) We’re talking about delineating between all the tasks we do during the day by classifying them based on how much we’d have to pay someone else to do it.

When you do an analysis of your time like this, you’ll likely find that you have a lot of $10/hour tasks, some $100/hour, and a select few worth $1,000/hour.

This, of course, isn’t our original thinking. It comes from a book called 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More. (Sound a little like those book titles at the top?) If you aren’t interested in reading a 230 page book, I found this review from Entrepreneur to be a good overview.

So what happens when you categorize all your work into values? You’re almost certainly going to find out that your effective hourly rate is pretty low. Why? Because you spend an awful lot of time doing tasks that are very menial.

This isn’t your fault. It’s just that you can’t spend time on valuable stuff when it takes so much time to do the other things.

That’s why we made FranFunnel.

For the first time, franchise sales people can be equipped with a technology platform that significantly lowers the amount of $10/hour work you’re doing. And then what happens? You can focus on the stuff that really matters!

Between our automation and workflow solutions, you don’t have to waste time anymore with tasks you’d rather not do. Close deals. Close deals. Close deals.

Get FranFunnel.

This article was written by Eli Robinson, General Manager of FranFunnel.

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